On Funding ObamaCare

By

Brian M. Carney

Oct. 3, 2013 12:23 p.m. ET

In the current budget debate, Barack Obama and his supporters are fond of saying, as the president did again Wednesday, that Congress should allow the "Treasury to pay for things that Congress itself already authorized," as if this should end the argument. A variation on this theme is the contention that the Affordable Care Act is "the law of the land," and therefore Congress has no choice but to authorize spending to implement it.

The trouble with this argument is that while a Congress did pass the...